The big question to me here is why my settings change after a complete shutdown (when logging into Windows after the black screen I explained above, which tells me that the system has failed several times before and that I may change my settings in the BIOS).
Hmmmm, I think your problem is in the mem timings. I've experienced that too with incorrect or invalid ram timings, try setting it to 1866 as I've said above and experiment with different ram timing until it boots correctly without the black screen nags, mine worked at 8-8-8-24-31 ddr3 1600 cl8 1.5v ripjaws it's intel optimized I can't get it to work on cl6 timing though.